Atlassian and Upwork team up to help small teams ship big

Work smarter, better, and faster with weekly tips and how-tos.

The innovator’s dilemma

From an Etsy store owner to a mobile app startup, these days every company is a software company. However, hiring a full-time staff of Silicon Valley engineers is simply not a viable option for most small teams.

At Atlassian, we see this issue all the time. Entrepreneurs and small business owners are often faced with a dilemma: great ideas, but limited development resources. Software talent shouldn’t be out of reach for entrepreneurs and opportunity should never be out of reach for software talent.

That’s why we have teamed up with Upwork, one of the largest freelance marketplaces in the world, to remove barriers and streamline how startups, or any company that needs software talent, can hire quality development talent in a beautifully simple way.

Atlassian with Upwork means not making tradeoffs

Building a development team that can scale and downsize based on the ebbs and flows of the company’s business is crucial for startups in stealth mode and beyond. As the workforce becomes increasingly distributed, the ability to hire talent on an as-needed basis becomes a way to effectively manage run rate while iterating on your offering. Our new integration, called Upwork Job Post for Jira, allows teams to outsource dev work as needed by converting Jira tickets directly into freelance job postings.

For example, say a product manager for an ecommerce website needs to ship two new features to hit the company’s quarterly goals. However, with only two full-time devs, the engineering team only has bandwidth for one. Instead of killing the second feature, the PM can scope out the project in Jira Software and hit “Post Job to Upwork” to find the best freelance talent to build that feature. Or, the PM can transition part of both projects out to Upwork while the in-house talent can focus on the platform or the core architecture.

Up until now, a follow the sun, scalable workforce was an advantage only large companies could recruit, manage, and afford. Now, small teams have an advantage for getting quality code shipped faster.

Democratizing the economy of software development

According to Upwork’s recent New Quarterly Data for Hot Skills, technical chops such as AngularJS and Java top the list of in-demand skills based on freelancer billing growth rates. Besides providing small teams with the resources that they need, on the other side of this integration are talented freelance developers looking for a challenge.

Now, engineers anywhere can team up with startups to build amazing products from afar. A team in San Francisco can check in work at the end of their day and a team on the other side of the world can pick it up. Startups just got faster, global collaboration just got easier.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Create a Jira ticket that specs out the feature, bug, or issue that needs development work. Any entrepreneur can do the same and in simple terms describe what it is they want to build. Even Jessica Alba famously announced that she creates a Jira tickets!

Step 2: Add a few quick job details such as the job title, pricing (hourly or fixed), and branding requirements.

Step 3: Hit “post job” to Upwork and start hiring! A link to the job posting will appear on your Jira ticket for quick reference and progress tracking.